CPHS Members:

We hope you will attend the ANNUAL MEETING on Tuesday, May 22nd, at 7:30 pm at the Cleveland Park Club. Details about the meeting are in an email sent to all current members on May 8th. Reservations are NOT required for the meeting, but we are trying out a new reservations system and would love to have you test it to help us get an accurate headcount for refreshments at the meeting. Click here for meeting reservations and details. Biographies of those nominated to the Board of Directors for 2012-2015 terms are posted here.

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1. With the extremely dry weather we’ve been having, newly-planted trees around the neighborhood need your help to get a good start in life. The city’s chief Urban Forester has asked us to participate in DDOT’s “Canopy Keepers” progam. The city will provide a free slow-drip watering device to residents and businesses who agree to care for young trees. Click here for information on the program, and here for a map of all recently-planted trees. (The address-search field on the map doesn’t work properly, but zooming in on Cleveland Park should work.)

2. CPHS is organizing a tree team for ongoing care of trees and green space in the neighborhood. If you would like to be part of that effort, please email us and we’ll put you in touch with the team leaders. Thanks!

That’s one of the most frequent questions we get here at CPHS. Here’s how to get started researching your home’s history:

1. CPHS has acquired a copy of D.C.’s database of building permits, 1877-1949. If you email us, we can check the date the construction permit for your home was issued and who the owner and builder and, in some cases, the architect were. (Read more about the database here.)

2. To investigate the ownership history of your home further, and see its context on early maps, head to the Washingtoniana Division at the MLK Library downtown (Gallery Place Metro). The Washingtoniana staff are experts at house history research and will guide you through the use of their resources. You can use city directories and census records to track who lived in your house over time. Click here for Washingtoniana’s guide to house history research.

3. The D.C. Humanities Council produced a short video that follows a researcher as he visits Washingtoniana and the Historical Society of Washington to research his house’s history.

4. The Historical Society of Washington is currently regrouping after some financial troubles, but they expect to have a librarian and reopen their library to researchers later in the summer. In the meantime, their library catalog provides access to a wealth of digitized materials, including parts of their historic photograph collections. Go to this page to search their collections by street address and neighborhood; if a digitized image is available online, you’ll see in the search results a link that looks like this:

5. In addition to finding building, ownership, and occupancy records for your house, you can sometimes find ads or news stories that mention your house or its residents by searching the archives of local newspapers. The D.C. Public Library provides free online access to local newspaper archives to anyone with a library card; just enter your barcode when prompted.

Here’s some of what you said, and some of what we’re doing in response:

You are interested in the history of the neighborhood and of your own houses. We are:

• Forming a working group to bring together neighbors interested in an oral history project. If you are interested in participating in this project, please email and let us know!
• Exploring the possibility of providing house-history research services for residents.
• Planning more talks and tours for the coming year, including walking tours in September and a house tour in October. If you know people who would be great at leading walking tours, or if you’d like to lead one yourself, let us know!
• Planning more historical content for this site and for upcoming issues of Voices. We need people to write blog posts for this site and articles for Voices! Let us know if you would like to contribute, or if you have a suggestion for a topic.
  
• Actively gathering news of local history events and workshops around town and posting them on Facebook.

You want us to provide more direct and concrete support to property owners as stewards of Cleveland Park’s architectural legacy. We are:

• Planning events to showcase a range of historically- and environmentally-appropriate design solutions.
• Looking at preparing a list of trusted craftspeople with experience working on historic structures.
• Working on providing specific design advice to homeowners and builders.
• Examining what supportive preservation advocacy will mean in the future.

You want more clarity in the architectural review process. We are:

• Meeting with the city’s Historic Preservation Office to offer support for the preparation of Cleveland Park-specific design guidelines
• Continuing to seek ways to coordinate our design review with the ANC’s in order to streamline the process for property owners and architects.
• Emphasizing the ARC’s historic support for the full range of Cleveland Park’s eclectic architecture as it has developed over time.
• Preparing better information about how we encourage both restoration and sensitive new design.

Over the coming weeks, we will be posting more information here on projects and plans, and responding to some specific questions that came up in the survey responses. Watch this space! In the meantime, our Facebook page is open for you to discuss these issues, suggest new ideas, and connect with neighbors who share an interest in Cleveland Park’s history.

It can be tricky to find your way around the atlases and locate the parts of the city you’re interested in. Baist’s atlases were issued in multi-volume sets in three-year cycles, with D.C. occupying first 2 and then 3 and then 4 volumes. The N.W. quadrant north of Florida Avenue is generally in Vol. 3, so you can use the Baist atlases to catch a snapshot of neighborhood development every 3-4 years. For example, here is Baist’s 4-volume atlas set published between 1913 and 1915. If you click on the third volume in that set, you’ll find thumbnails of the pages in  Vol. 3, which was published in 1915, including an Index Page, which will guide you to the part of the city you want to find:

If you click on the thumbnail of the Index page and then zoom in, following the directions on the page, you’ll see that Cleveland Park occupies plates 26 and 28 of this volume:

Then click back to the overview page for the volume and click ahead to the third group of pages to find plates 26 and 28. Plate 26 covers the from south side of Ordway Street south, and plate 28 covers the northern section of the neighborhood. Here is plate 26:

If you zoom in or download the full-sized image from the Library of Congress site, you’ll see some blocks almost fully developed and others owned by private owners or bought up by developers but not yet built out.

Compare the corresponding page from the 1919 atlas, and you will find the platted areas gradually being built out and the undeveloped areas shrinking:

By way of contrast, in 1903, the first year the Library of Congress has digitized, the area was so little developed that Vol. 3 is just called “West Washington and the County.” (In this atlas, Cleveland Park is on Plates 18 and 21.) The gradual movement of development across the boundaries of the original L’Enfant City (Florida Avenue was originally “Boundary Street”) gives some useful context for the development of D.C.’s early “suburbs”. You will see familiar landmarks like the Zoo and the Naval Observatory, but the Cathedral has not yet appeared on the map, as its foundation stone was laid in 1907.

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Cynthia Hamilton and Dana Elder of Hamilton Snowber Architects with their contribution to the 2011 CPHS Gingerbread House auction

Thanks to all who helped make 2011 a successful year for CPHS, especially our members and the all-volunteer Board and Architectural Review Committee! We have great things planned for 2012, so join now, like our Facebook page, and check back here for news of new programming. Just a hint: a new Cleveland Park house tour is in the works! Details as soon as they become available. Meanwhile, since the weather in Washington is finally turning wintry, we leave you with these yummy contributions to our holiday auction of architect-designed gingerbread houses. Hope to see you in 2012!

Gingerbread House by Landis Construction